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The Ancestors Of Peter Atherly
by
It was shortly after the christening of Atherly town that an incident occurred which at first shook, and then the more firmly established, his mild monomania. His widowed mother had been for the last two years an inmate of a private asylum for inebriates, through certain habits contracted while washing for the camp in the first year of her widowhood. This had always been a matter of open sympathy to Rough and Ready; but it was a secret reproach hinted at in Atherly, although it was known that the rich Peter Atherly kept his mother liberally supplied, and that both he and his sister “Jinny” or Jenny Atherly visited her frequently. One day he was telegraphed for, and on going to the asylum found Mrs. Atherly delirious and raving. Through her son’s liberality she had bribed an attendant, and was fast succumbing to a private debauch. In the intervals of her delirium she called Peter by name, talked frenziedly and mysteriously of his “high connections”–alluded to himself and his sister as being of the “true breed”–and with a certain vigor of epithet, picked up in the familiarity of the camp during the days when she was known as “Old Ma’am Atherly” or “Aunt Sally,” declared that they were “no corn-cracking Hoosiers,” “hayseed pikes,” nor “northern Yankee scum,” and that she should yet live to see them “holding their own lands again and the lands of their forefathers.” Quieted at last by opiates, she fell into a more lucid but scarcely less distressing attitude. Recognizing her son again, as well as her own fast failing condition, she sarcastically thanked him for coming to “see her off,” congratulated him that he would soon be spared the lie and expense of keeping her here on account of his pride, under the thin pretext of trying to “cure” her. She knew that Sally Atherly of Rough and Ready wasn’t considered fit company for “Atherly of Atherly” by his fine new friends. This and much more in a voice mingling maudlin sentiment with bitter resentment, and with an ominous glitter in her bloodshot and glairy eyes. Peter winced with a consciousness of the half-truth of her reproaches, but the curiosity and excitement awakened by the revelations of her frenzy were greater than his remorse. He said quickly:–
“You were speaking of father!–of his family–his lands and possessions. Tell me again!”
“Wot are ye givin’ us?” she ejaculated in husky suspicion, opening upon him her beady eyes, in which the film of death was already gathering.
“Tell me of father,–my father and his family! his great-grandfather!–the Atherlys, my relations–what you were saying. What do you know about them?”
“THAT’S all ye wanter know–is it? THAT’S what ye’r’ comin’ to the old washer-woman for–is it?” she burst out with the desperation of disgust. “Well–give it up! Ask me another!”
“But, mother–the old records, you know! The family Bible–what you once told us–me and Jinny!”
Something gurgled in her throat like a chuckle. With the energy of malevolence, she stammered: “There wasn’t no records–there wasn’t no family Bible! it’s all a lie–you hear me! Your Atherly that you’re so proud of was just a British bummer who was kicked outer his family in England and sent to buzz round in Americky. He honey-fogled me–Sally Magregor–out of a better family than his’n, in Kansas, and skyugled me away, but it was a straight out marriage, and I kin prove it. It was in the St. Louis papers, and I’ve got it stored away safe enough in my trunk! You hear me! I’m shoutin’! But he wasn’t no old settler in Mizzouri–he wasn’t descended from any settler, either! He was a new man outer England–fresh caught–and talked down his throat. And he fooled ME–the darter of an old family that was settled on the right bank of the Mizzouri afore Dan’l Boone came to Kentucky–with his new philanderings. Then he broke up, and went all to pieces when we struck Californy, and left ME–Sally Magregor, whose father had niggers of his own–to wash for Rough and Ready! THAT’S your Atherly! Take him! I don’t want him–I’ve done with him! I was done with him long afore–afore”–a cough checked her utterance,–“afore”–She gasped again, but the words seemed to strangle in her throat. Intent only on her words and scarcely heeding her sufferings, Peter was bending over her eagerly, when the doctor rudely pulled him away and lifted her to a sitting posture. But she never spoke again. The strongest restoratives quickly administered only left her in a state of scarcely breathing unconsciousness.